The Extreme Weekend

It occurred to me the other day that I passed the halfway mark from when I arrived in Costa Rica and when I'll be leaving to go back home. It's kind of a strange feeling. As cliché as it is, time really flies when you're having fun. I feel like every time I blinked I ended up somewhere new in the country. Home stay will be over in a few short days, but we still have three more sites to go to, not including our vacations that start this Saturday.  But Costa Rica still has plenty to offer, and this past weekend definitely proved that to me. 

My weekend started off with some rock climbing after school. The guys who work at the gym have started to recognize us and seem to really enjoy having us there, probably because we give them an opportunity to work on their English. Also as our Spanish has gotten better, we're starting to understand what they've been trying to tell us climbing wise. There was definitely a learning curve to translate the climbing lingo in English to climbing lingo in Spanish and vice versa. But we were definitely able to crack a few jokes with them on Thursday, so that's a good sign.

The next day (really freaking early) we all hopped on a bus to Manuel Antonio, which is known for great beaches and its National Park. We didn't really have time or the funds to go to the Park (although I plan to go within my vacation), so we spent most of the time on the beach. I had a great time on the beach, and the views were fantastic.

Yep. Could get really used to this.

The only drawback to the beach was that it was a little touristy (and therefore a little more expensive than elsewhere) and the fact that my gringa skin was not used to tropical sun on beaches. I may or may not have gotten slightly burned despite my constant slathering of sunscreen (SPF 50, so don't even talk to me). Nevertheless, the fact that I was able to actually be at a beach out ruled any negatives I had about Manuel Antonio. My friends can attest, I was not unlike an overexcited dog when we finally got in the water. 

Saturday night I ended up returning to San Jose slightly earlier than my friends. This was so I could catch a bus to Pursical in the morning to take me to the countryside where I was finally able to go horseback riding. For five glorious hours, I went on a trail ride that took us through tiny towns and the normally unseen countryside. The scenery was beautiful, and it also was just great to be back on a horse again. The whole experience was a blast, and I also got some pretty good pizza out of it too. 

One of my favorite views.

The only picture I managed to take because I was terrified of dropping my phone in the dirt.

Needless to say, I'm still trying to recover from this weekend, but overall it was a fantastic experience. My only regret about the whole weekend was the fact that I kind of left a presentation to the wayside that was due on Monday. However, the presentation actually went rather well, so I'm interpreting that as a sign that my Spanish has improved. 

Just a few more days of Spanish class remain and then I'll be free on my vacation! I'm really excited to finally actually have a break and to just enjoy what Costa Rica has to offer. Updates about my break will come soon!

City Zen

After roughing it in Palo Verde, returning to the city has been a welcome breath of fresh air. I have seriously underestimated the value of having a double bed (that's not a top bunk) and a room to myself. It is very safe to say that I am enjoying my home stay thus far. 

Overall, my home stay is amazing. The house itself is gorgeous, in addition to the fact that I have my own room. Honestly, the entire set up of the house is very similar to my life in the United States.  My mama tica (it's what we all call our host moms- Tico/Tica is basically a slang term for someone from Costa Rica), Denia has been great so far. She's very welcoming and treats me like one of her own- especially in terms of her trying to set me up with a Tico while I'm here. She's so candid and hilarious. I'm really happy where I ended up in terms of my home stay. Also I have a puppy tico as well, so that also makes life pretty awesome.

Name: Gatsby, Haircut: Unfortunate

The Spanish classes have also been going fairly well. Originally, I somehow ended up in a level lower than I should have been. But after speaking with my professor and the director of the language academy, I was put in a class that was more suited to my level. So there was an unfortunate amount of stress and boredom associated with those first few days of class. But now I'm in a level more suited for my level of Spanish, I'm enjoying the classes a lot more, and I actually am learning a lot. My spanish has already improved within the span of a week, which has been fantastic. I also catch myself thinking to myself in Spanish as well, which is also a great sign of improvement. 

Additionally, the language academy hosts different cultural activities after classes which are also a lot of fun. So far, I've learned some basic salsa moves (but only from the guy's perspective because there were too many girls to guys that day). But the fact that I actually learned a few dance moves is an obstacle in itself. Tomorrow I'm going to be participating in a cooking class that I'm really excited for. It should be a lot of fun!

I have had to get used to city living again though. The first couple days were filled with the stress of understanding the bus system here in Costa Rica. Busses here are run by private companies. So there's really no predicting when the bus will actually arrive or how comfortable it will be. Also shout out to the people who manage to do their make up on the busses in the morning. You are astounding individuals, as I can barely manage to sit in the seat. But at least the bus is super cheap. It works out that at most it will cost around 50 cents for one bus ride to school or back to my neighborhood. 

We've also had a chance to explore parts of the city that we haven't seen before. Of course, we also returned to the climbing gym, and are planning on returning this week. The night life here is also kind of interesting. In most cases, most Ticos go out for one or two drinks and then call it good for the night, which is not necessarily the culture in the United States. Some of the night life is clearly catered to foreigners (such as ourselves), but some of it is clearly more Tico. We've unfortunately seen a lot of the stuff catered to foreigners (but shout out to the Costa Rican Beer Factory, because that was delicious and had great beer), so hopefully we'll see more of the more authentic stuff as our home stay continues. 

I apologize for the lack of pictures in this blog post, but I normally don't carry around my phone or camera for safety purposes. I'll attempt to take some pictures of San Pedro/elsewhere soon. My friends and I are also possibly planning on going to the beach this weekend, which should also be a lot of fun. Essentially, I'm looking at this home stay as a break from school, even though I do have work for my spanish class. Staying in a house to be doted on is definitely what the doctor ordered based on the first part of the semester.

Final Days at Palo Verde

The past couple days have honestly been a blur, mainly spent working on the various assignments that needed to get done during our last days here at Palo Verde.

One assignment was to construct a dichotomous key for some of the common plant species that surround the station. A dichotomous key is a tool that can be used to identify certain species based on traits that they possess. Each species has to follow the other in a sequence and you can't repeat traits. This actually turned out to be a little difficult- it's pretty much like putting a puzzle together and took a lot of thinking about plant traits. However, while we were walking around looking at the traits of each plant, there were a couple of awesome individuals hanging around the area which made walking around in the sun a bit better:

Giant group of Coatis! 

All of the marsh animals!

After that, we had our midterms. They went pretty well, it was just a chore to convince ourselves to study for the two exams that we had. Especially after finishing up IPs, the concept of more work was just not appealing. Then, as an extra bonus, we had to do our rewrites for our IP papers pretty much right after the exams. But finally, all the work is done and now I just get to relax. Which ended up looking like this for the brief period that we had between exams and rewrites:

Shout out to Miki for having the patience to do this to my hair and taking this picture. 

I did also manage to take one last hike in the morning to watch the sunrise from my favorite lookout point here. It turned out to be well worth it to hike up there:

So although the last couple days here at Palo Verde have been a craze of work-induced stress, I've still managed to take some time to soak everything in. I feel like I blinked and the past three weeks went by. I'm a little sad to see Palo Verde go- the habitats and organisms around here are fascinating. But I will admit that I'm getting a little tired of the station itself (there's pretty much nothing to do past the trails that we already did).

We head out tomorrow to the home stay section of the course. There, we'll be learning Spanish at a language academy as well as staying with a family for the next two weeks. I'm really excited to meet my family tomorrow. If home stay is anything like how it was when I visited Nicaragua, I know I'm going to have a great time. Let's just hope that my Spanish comes back quickly.

For now, adios Palo Verde!

Mangroves = Yes, Snakes = No

I'll begin this blog post with a few photos that really should have been in my last blog post. Unfortunately it appeared the day after I posted the last blog post, but whatever.

Yes. That is a boa constrictor.

I happened upon this lovely specimen because I almost sat down right next to its hidey hole. If you know me at all, snakes are not my jam. Maybe I watched one too many nature documentaries where the snake eats some cute fluffy mammal as a child, but whatever. I just find them to be creepy. Later, I found out that my professor went out with one of the workers here at the station and caught it. We had "Show-And-Tell" that night where I spent most of my time on top of a chair.

I did get over my sissiness about snakes for about 2 seconds to pet it. But that was enough adventure for me for the rest of the night. But now every time someone finds a snake, my professor gets really excited and then tries to shove it in my unwilling face. I acknowledge that snakes are cool organisms, but from a healthy distance.

There weren't too many other surprises in the field, so my independent research project went fairly smoothly. The independent project proved to be a pretty fun experience (until the presentation and the paper for it were due on the same day). In the end, we discovered that the presence of a predator had no effect on the visitation of the pollinators or insects, but we did find that the spiders were taking as many bee species as we saw visiting. So, our data suggest that a predator avoidance strategy for insects isn't present in this system concerning Peucetia viridans and Ruellia inundata, but that the presence of P. viridans may be affecting pollinator populations. Nerdiness aside, I did actually have a lot of fun working on this project and it definitely gave me some new ideas for my own research back home.

Today was our first day in a week in which we haven't been working on our independent projects. It actually was a blast. We hopped on a river boat and were taken on a tour of the Tempisque River, which feeds a large portion of the marshland here. The sights from the river boat were beautiful, and it was nice to simply spend some time relaxing on the river.

View from the river.

Look how safe I was on the boat, ma!

The boat eventually took us to a mangrove forest which was also a super cool experience (albeit super muddy). Costa Rica only has six species of mangroves, and we saw four today. Mangroves are also just really interesting plants in general considering their adaptations for salt water. One of the really cool things that we found out today is that mangroves actually secrete salt from their leaves where it later crystalizes (so if you lick the leaves, you can taste the salt on them). And they also have a wide array of root adaptations, as evidenced in the picture below:

In addition, mangroves host a lot of diverse species from fish to mammals. One of my favorite sights today was the wide range of crabs that I was able to see. They were all pretty cute.

Aren't you just an adorable little detritivore?

The other almost success of the day was that I was able to tromp around in deep mud all day and managed not to fall on my face. Key word is almost. Instead, I fell on my butt when I was attempting to trudge down a very slick slope of mud to go back to the boat. It was labeled as one of my more graceful falls by the group, but my friend put it best: "You were doing so well today. And then that happened." I may have been covered in mud, but I still had a lot of fun today and learned a lot. And, on the way back to Palo Verde we managed to see at least five crocodiles which was awesome.

Crikey!

The next few days will host a few free days as well as a midterm. I'm sure another snake will pop out at me somewhere, so I'll update about that terror sometime soon.